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For the 17-year-old alternative pop musician, a song can be anything. “I write songs off of one experience. Maybe I dropped something on the floor, and it broke, and the water in the cup made the shape of a heart or something. Then I'd write a song about that. Sometimes it’s about that. Sometimes it’s a whole life story.”
Constance’s propensity for seeing beauty in the mundane is so authentic it emerges even when it is not called upon, even when she’s just explaining her process. When she can’t find the inspiration in her own life, she turns to history, having written songs about Anne Frank and Princess Diana.
“Hold my hand hunter” is the third single from Constance’s forthcoming EP, Singing for fun, due for release on 5 June 2026. Though Constance put out two albums when she was just 14 – the lo-fi, folksy Lucky and eclectic bedroom pop-inspired To Catherine – this new project has taught her to take things slower. “People talk about their album or EP taking years to make, and I was like, ‘Ooh, that's so silly. I could make an EP in two days.’” But when she was recording Singing for fun, her approach shifted from fledgling prolificness to something more intentional. “I could be working on this EP for trillions of years,” she says. “When you love something so much, you just can't let it go.”
Although she’s used to writing and recording quickly, it took Constance a year to finish “Hold my hand hunter”. She was able to figure it out only once she began working with LA producer Alex Craig (After, IAN SWEET, Coco & Clair Clair) to introduce the track’s electronic elements, while maintaining its off-kilter sweetness.
The first sound in “Hold my hand hunter” is a drone sound: a mechanized beep that quickly lowers and distorts into a whirring hum. In six seconds Constance’s voice enters, bright as anything: “I would go hunting / But I’ll make you hold my hand.” There’s a playfulness to her delivery, an earnest sweetness to the conversational tone of her voice that feels refreshing in a word so hellbent on irony – especially among young people. The song moves from a skeletal folktronica arrangement into something lusher, with off-kilter syncopated vocalisations alongside possibly her most straightforward pop songwriting. It’s only for the last 15 seconds that the arrangement fully opens up, with a dreamy and distorted guitar passage and Constance's voice echoing, “And I run to you.”
According to Constance, “Hold my hand hunter” is an attempt to make sense of a complicated relationship in her life. “It's about this figure in my life that is a bit older,” she reveals. “I kind of view him as a brother, but he's not my brother. But there was also a really deep connection there.”
As Constance sings, with a twee twinkle in her articulation, “I would go hunting / If the hunter let me hold his frigid hand,” electronic beats turn to strummed acoustic strings. She considers a relationship that was tender, even loving, alongside the violence of the hunt. Against the parallel violence of the track’s electronic whirring, her gentle voice surges. What results is an arresting portrait of intimacy and danger alike, told with the nuance and forthrightness of decades of wisdom.
To call someone “wise beyond one’s years” is a cliche, and rarely a useful one. Eilish Constance is not a thoughtful and nuanced songwriter, performer, and musician despite her age; to say such a thing would imply that her being a teenage girl is a disadvantage or detriment to her capabilities. It is neither a novelty nor a weakness, and Constance’s music is far too complex to pretend either could be true. “I really connected to music because I wasn't good at school. The only thing I had was music,” Constance says. “School is life when you're a young kid. That's life, and I couldn't do life. So I chose a different path and just focused on music.”
“I never wanted to fit in. I've always dressed weird and acted weird. I didn't like fitting in. I want to carry that into my music career.” Constance has cultivated an image, and a sound, that reflects her strangeness: by turns playful and coquettish. Her Instagram features an image of lace-covered bruises not far from a blurry one of a Dumbo pin with the caption: “I love you”. Her aesthetic is always cohesive, never contrived; always feminine, never resigned. On Spotify, her bio reads simply: “Sister suffragette”.
“There’s a lot of hope that was put into this song,” Constance says of “Hold my hand hunter”. “I could see the future, you know? That’s why this EP is so important to me.” When asked about if she sees music in that future: “I really, really hope. I mean, I'm going to do anything. I'm never going to stop making music, but I would love for as many people to hear it as they can and connect.”
Constance hopes for her listeners too that her songs can mould themselves to their experiences, or meet them halfway between her life and theirs. “When I make a song, and I have in mind that people are going to listen to it, I want them to interpret it their own way,” she says. “I think what's so beautiful about songs is that it's not just one experience that I had. Everybody's experience can connect to it.” Perhaps Eilish Constance isn’t wise beyond her years, but she certainly possesses an artist’s wisdom, and a rare ability to understand and be understood at once.
English (US) · 